State of the U.S. Economy/Federal Budget Factors Troubles/Jobs

The Present U.S. economic crisis was not a consequence of over-taxation. It is a result of Wall Street deregulation the past 40 years leading the nation through an increasing cascade of financial crashes and increasing public debt.

Inadequate political and economic philosophical competence in government has let a financial/arbitrage, LBO/CBO, derivative gaming of Wall Street promotes a corrupting new class of market predators. The financial predators have expanded the leverage power of abstract capital to exploit their prey of real, material product producing industry. Government never reigned in those predators. In fact Allan Greenspan and a host of other supporters of deregulating the financial sector defeated better philosophical management approaches to governing capitalism for the benefit of the citizens of the United States. My most recent book of reading on this topic ‘The Age of Greed’ by Madrick provided data for a few of the ideas of this post.

Since the Reagan administration U.S. tax rates have been at an historical low going back nearly to the depression era. The massive public debt of the 80’s and 90’s was largely caused by a perfidious deregulatory financial sector investment strategy of dumping debt wherever possible while cutting taxes. The public provided bail outs for numerous corporations and financial businesses the last 30 years and paid for much public infrastructure supporting corporate users such as Interstate highways and airports.

Elite hedge fund managers (George Soros earned 3 billion dollars in 2007) investing for wealthy packs of financial hyenas scouring the globe for vulnerable business and currency prey to kill and devour while real unemployment rate in the U.S.A. may be around 17%. Only 56% of working age Americans have jobs.

Some economists favoring a self-regulating economy without government intervention or governance also support the idea of a naturally high level of unemployment below which inflation occurs. Victimizing the working class is thus regarded as the natural right and duty of those with concentrated wealth benefiting the public by enriching themselves and wrecking the economy of the poor.

I enjoy reading philosophy yet never did get to Ayn Rand’s books. I enjoy more technical or classical works of philosophy and generally avoid books like; Thus Spake Zarthustra, The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, None Dare Call It Treason and so forth running a little too political or anecdotal for my philosophical interest. Still, since many ‘conservatives’ read Ayn Rand’s books with more enthusiasm than I had in reading Anna Karenina so in some future decade I may find a copy of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to browse’.

As a Russian émigré’ I would guess Ayn Rand was naturally moved to be anti-statist emerging from a Soviet-Tsarist historical background of totalitarianism. Such ideological thesis-antithesis evolutions do not however allow much space for intelligent, adaptive social analysis in political-economy. Economic individualism in pursuit of abstract financial goals that manipulate real property in the wild kingdom can lead to chaos, anarchy, nihilism and general unhappiness on the happy planet; in fact the entire environment can go to pot. George Soros’ challenging environment of upbringing also obviously led him to develop a skill exploiting abstract industrial financial and economic transaction of the market rather than developing new industry.

The conservative investment strategy plundering and giving away U.S. national economic quality and quantity has destroyed labor unions and the progress of income for manufacturing workers. The nation transitions into service workers at lower pay and non-materially productive businesses plus medical care providers. Free enterprise has difficulty surviving hordes of banking and financial predators attacking the manufacturing ungulate herds like the hyena, wolf and cheetah.

The U.S. economy experienced a surge of financial deregulation from the Carter administration letting higher interest rate charges on credit cards to the securitization of mortgages and later Allan Greenspan’s support of collateralized debt obligations and derivatives. The Reagan administration allowed Standard oil to buy Gulf oil during his administration reducing competition in gasoline pricing, and in the Bush II years Wall Street’s major financial firms were allowed through lax regulation and a loose political philosophy of letting the financial market regulate itself to sell derivative and mortgage debt obligations in tranched repayment bond packages to more than 40 times their collateral. The nation had more than 17 trillion dollars in mortgage debt by 2006.

The over-production of house construction and trading of mortgages in a variety of obscure and risky packages to investors allowed Wall Street bankers and traders to collect huge fees-they were stimulated to sell sub-prime mortgages with gouging contract terms to poor buyers doomed to fail at repayment. The financial sector of the economy was soaking up profits and little was being invested in honest industrial and infrastructure growth.

In a way Wall Street invested only in jobs that cannot be outsourced abroad to cheaper production facilities in China. China of course did buy much of the mortgage securities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Restarting the U.S. housing construction business cycle may be difficult with so much surplus housing the poor and unemployed cannot afford to buy-maybe the homes should be rented at half price rather than stand empty for a loss.

Honest lenders will be at a disadvantage in a securitized housing finance business environment. Deregulation of the recovered financial sector again may encourage a new housing bubble cycle to begin. Creating jobs in new, materially productive non-outsourcable industry would be a preferred direction in reducing the U.S. employment rate. Those jobs could be in building artificial, hollow mountain ranges for housing, business and hydroponic gardening and retail office space etc. The exteriors would resemble natural ecosystems yet collect solar and wind power. Integrated space for non-fragmented ecosystem continuity would exist along the base.

I have been reading ‘The Age of Greed’ by Madrick recently and become more informed of some of the structural problems of Wall Street and government the last 40 years in directing capital into a spaced out financial sector instead of into manufacturing and modernizing infrastructure in the U.S.A. That will be very challenging to correct.

I learned recently that the U.S. Government extended 12 trillion dollars in loan and debt guarantees during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Merely returning to business as usual-to a deregulated Wall Street environment allowing the domination of investing in financial instruments for profit instead of businesses for themselves will continue to degrade the content of the U.S. economy as traders look with predatory gaze upon anything that can be leveraged for buy out or collateralized, packaged as debt obligation and resold as derivatives. Real manufacturing capital investment is given unnecessary risk and volatility by the corrupt financial market forces, and inventive material genius is degraded in favor of slick financial skimming genius in the deregulated business environment wherein irrational empirical investment priorities are regarded as collectively rational. If the invisible hand of CDOs and derivatives without regulation is regarded as rational, so might that of a robotic arm under the control of a random pickpocketing program.

Ai Weiwei Back on the Street

It is good that the Chinese Governmemnt has released one of their more creative artists, poets and architects from captivity-China can use creative thought as can the rest of the world to help redesign human socio-economic use of land and sea toward ecological renewability and restoration of biological diversity.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13878859

It is not that the Chinese Government is especially slow and the United States Government quick-witted on ecological economic leadership and biodiversity conservation and restoration. So far as I am aware few or no governments of the world today are constructing ecologically rational economic structures remotely adequately of meeting the challenges to human survival ahead.

Constructing artificial mountain ranges in which humanity can live with a zero displacement of ecological biota or fauna-even restoring quality habitat, while also creating new ways to grow food perhaps indoors and employ democratic principles to vote on private enterprise proposals submitted for development and approved or rated on low entropy and high social productivity criteria-this will require much development by creative individuals such as Ai Weiwei if human survival is to have a good chance in the centuries ahead on Earth.

A Comment on 'The Age of Greed' by Jeff Madrick and Ecological Economics

This book of review of the decline of the American economy 1970-2011 by Jeff Madrick covers the usual stories of the free market/deregulation overkill that allowed American real productivity to be subverted by wise guy money and finance trading schemes.

Having just read a book 'Where the Wild Things Went' on the decay of the world's biosphere through the elimination of large predators that let the proliferation of small critters occur that in turn over-use the available green resources, I could not help comparing the role of a runaway financial sector unregulated by the conservative belief that all trimming of honest souls is good and the decline of corporate industrial productivity when LBO's (leveraged buy outs) with junk bonds helped pile up U.S. debt. In a way the U.S. public debt is a kind of leveraged buyout of rational economic and political thought.

When successful corporations producing some particular goods with a special genius were undervalued it became even easier to borrow money to buy them up through junk bonds and then sell the parts; subsidiaries, firing employees and so forth after taking over the prey. Over-extended deregulation became a kind of equivalent of allowing the extermination of American wolves, coyotes and so forth that let the deer populations rise an order of magnitude, eat all the flowering plants and others, crash bee populations, deny birds nesting habitat and ruin the health of the forests with even saplings being eaten and only older stands remaining.

Because the Obama generation has been trained to be simultaneously irrational, compliant and greedy I am not optimistic that either the environment or economy will be corrected in a good direction. President Obama has turned his back upon the kinds of innovation that a Roosevelt by have brought to bear to large economic challenges and claims to pre-empt republican leadership on their own goals of creating an irrationally greed driven political and economic system.

It is easy to anticipate that the conservative bulls would be seeking new things to leverage abroad in China, India and elsewhere while concentrating wealth and degrading the quality of life for ordinary people that might formerly have had a reasonably good prospect for a good standard of living.

The conventional U.S. economic posture is light years away from meaningful reforms toward an ecologically rational and balanced physical infrastructure of course. Artificial mountain range housing with wildlife outside wandering upon the slopes, the return of large scale predators controlled by human intelligence and made to live in non-fragmented restored ecosystems. Business models voted upon by democratic processes for actualization through selection for low-entropy effects and improvement of quality of life. Limiting the size of corporations to 5000 employees and the number of corporations any one may invest in to 3. These sorts of things probably will not occur before the end of human life cycle challenges are upon the planet. Oh well.

Female Class Action Suit Against Wal-Mart Rejected

The Supreme Court has rejected Wal-mart's class action suit by female workers as too broad. One wonders if a class action suit by negro slaves would have been too broad as well.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0620/Supreme-Court-dismisses-women-s-class-action-lawsuit-against-Wal-Mart

Illegal Alien Was Anchorage Alaska Police Office Six Years

During his six years as an Anchorage Police Officer the Mexican without legal immigration status managed to get 27,000 dollars of Alaska Permanent Fund checks as well.

Obviously his crime did pay for he probably bought a home in Mexico and invested wisely. If Mexican drug cartels are able to infiltrate citizens in to American police departments (this guy probably was just a free enterpriser helping himself and thus meeting the good graces of Wall Street types) as easily as this fellow from Mexico did that would explain why the 'war on drugs' is about as effective as the war on the Taliban.

http://www.adn.com/2011/06/14/v-printer/1915638/illegal-immigrant-ex-officer-faces.html

On Declining Sea Otter Populations in Alaska etc.

Sea Otter Populations in AlaskaThat news item on the decline of sea otter numbers in Alaska floated around in the news a few years ago. It was a peripheral item I wondered about and never got a conclusive answer for if such exists. In the 2008 book 'Where the Wild Things Went' there is a chapter at least partially explaining the phenomena.

I have had my own theories of course. Since the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and later collapse of the Prince William Sound herring fishery, and continuing, persistent oil below the gravel of the beaches and probably in piles in the deep waters I believed that the entire trophic food chain was adversely impacted. Stolzenburger's book provides better insight than just that. It has provided some material I can use in forming my new understanding of several issues in Alaska.

Long before the oil spill researchers and had studied predator-prey relationships in the oceans and the Aleutian islands. Sea otter eat sea urchins that decimate kelp beds.

Without sea otters sea urchins wipe out kelp beds that provide life support for a variety of sea life and fish. Sea otters are necessary for a good fisheries.

Killer whales eat sea otters in large numbers now because they are an intelligent, adaptive species, and also because their traditional foods such as stellar sea lion, whales and healthy fish populations have been decimated.

It isn't so bad that some sea otters are eaten by k. whales, yet too many dead otters let the sea urchin eat the kelp like goats eating grass down to the root. The entire food chain dislocation is theorized to have started with mechanical whaling in the early 20th century that killed a half million larger whales that k. whales preferred for the main course of their diet.

Large numbers of large whales let the entire food chain occupy a more balanced niche without domination by any one species. Sure humans killed the whales and radically overfish the available remaining fish, the salmon fishery in Alaska rivers like the Kuskokwim, Yukon and Susitna is a pale shadow of its former robust health. Russian promyshleniki exterminated the stellar sea cow and a vast prospective copper mine may leach heavy metals into Bristol Bay for hundreds or thousands of years-it is not just one particular element of the ocean ecology that is out of balance-human technical supremacy has devastated the ranks of normal marine trophic relationships that kept natural balances intact.

The long downward slope even through mariculture farming toward destruction of oceanic bio-diversity will be increasingly difficult to recover from in the decades and centuries ahead. Especially as presently Alaska State politics is corrupted by global extraction industry powers and natural resource management policy develop discognizant of biodiversity conservation methods required for recovering a vibrant marine ecosystem in Alaska.

Killer whales evidently are shot by boaters and others with no respect for life on Earth. A shoreline road from Juneau to a mine north of Juneau would let plinkers have new access for shooting whales of a few kinds.

Restoration of North Pacific whale numbers and an increasing resident fish population would let the entire food chain become a little healthier. For numbers of fish to increase overall it is probable that simultaneous management of all north Pacific species must occur as the balances amidst the species is as important to a particular species as vertical human predation quantitative harvest decisions on any particular specie.

Stop Wasting Billions of U.S. Tax Dollars Defending Alaska

The U.S. Government has thousands of armed forces in Alaska that could be discharged or relocated from service here in order to save billions each year of purposeless federal spending.

Fund a moon base for the future instead of Prussianesque military archaism of Alaska. Why spend billions of dollars each year-perhaps for the next decade, to keep a substanl force in a U.S. state without reasonable odds of invasion from Canada, Russia, China or Japan? It might be more reasonable to prep an effective attack counter-strike structure than to spend billions like drunken sailors each year for fear the Aleutians will have hordes of invaders in a few days.

A large military force in Alaska to defend against Moslem terrorists is not a reasonable paradigm, and they are perhaps the main military threat to the U.S.A. today besides congressional debtonomics. The expense of keeping a numerous standing army in Alaska is unnecessary. If we wait until Alaska is attacked before spending money, we probably can pocket the savings for decades and invest it in border security and national bicycle paths..

One wonders why the U.S. Army should have a significant presence in Alaska long after the end of the cold war?

Alaska could create jobs for Alaska residents by spending two billion dollars of its 50 billion dollar permanent fund each year on its National Guard troops instead of providing state workers an extra check from the oil royalty investment fund. The state could create jobs for people that need them instead of free money to some.

If the United States wants to effectively reduce its federal debt it should cut pork barrel military spending in Alaska. An invasion of the state of Alaska isn't likely, and a defense of Alaska with neutron bomb cruise missiles costing a few million each would be less costly over the long run compared to keeping concentrated military forces here that could be similarly depleted en mass by an opposition force nuclear device or two. Maybe Russian nuclear scientists could work with American bomb builders to create a peace through neutron bomb readiness defense arsenal for each nation.

Some are concerned with the moral aspect of military spending. Is it more morally correct to spend less on war phenomena than more if the less costly way comprises neutron bomb deterrence? Christian ethicists might select the same option as a pragmatist in choosing to reduce large present military costs and allow a less costly potential military method-I cannot say. Christian grace might provide opportunity to avoid making such Hobson's choices. Actualization of conflict parameters may not always be understood a priori. Sub-nuclear conflicts may bring more damage than neutron conflicts in some circumstances should the warlike select to activate war scenarios at some juncture.

The U.S. Government should lead its budgeting plans to modern force use criteria that would not break the bank while providing full coverage-at least as good as that the Congress has designed for health insurance coverage for the nation's poor.

Send 50 extra F.B.I. agents, border security and D.E.A. personnel with good field training to Alaska and reduce the cost of stationing thousands of soldiers in Alaska.

In the era of robotic aircraft ahead invading foreign forces can receive an appropriate condign response of neutron bombs reasonable soon after arrival.